This story first appeared in SA Country Life Magazine - June 2018
The Englishman’s grave stands on high ground next to the quiet Pakhuis
Pass. Enclosed by a wrought iron fence
and marked by a military headstone, it overlooks the rocky, khaki-clad
Cederberg Mountains located a couple of hours drive north of Cape Town. Somewhere below the road are the trenches dug
by British soldiers in the gravelly mountainside during the second Anglo Boer
War. I’ve heard that time and weather
have all but erased them. But I can’t
look for them today because I am travelling with dogs and they are not allowed
on that land. Anyway, there is little there
now but ghosts and the cool breeze. And
I’ve already found other defensive positions at the southern end of the range.
My visit is in the winter and the light is soft and pleasant. The Englishman who lies in the grave nearby
died in the summer and would have known the dry, weighty Cederberg heat sucking
the moisture from his body. He’d have
known the hard light turning everything into monochrome.
His name was Lieutenant Graham Vinicombe Winchester Clowes of the 1st
Battalion The Gordon Highanders . His
unit was here to stop Boer guerrillas from infiltrating the Cape Colony.
He was killed in a skirmish on the 30th of
January 1901.
Today, the mountain range is popular with rock climbers, hikers and
campers. Off road enthusiasts test their
4x4 driving skills here and mountain bikers seek adrenaline rushes. Mostly people come for the peace. Large parts of the Cederberg have been declared
a Wilderness area and hikers with permits can wander the range and camp wild
pretty much wherever they like. Visitors
search the rocks and caves for art left behind by hunter gatherer San people
who sought refuge in the range from African pastoralists and the encroachment
of European settler farms. They created
rock paintings depicting people and the animals they revered and hunted. Stories that we may never understand have
been left as beautiful puzzles for those willing to seek them out. Some of the paintings are mapped and easily accessible;
others stumbled upon by sharp-eyed explorers.
I have driven from Cape Town through the pretty, fruit growing valley
that surrounds the little town of Ceres.
For several hours I made the journey along the 4x4 only route, through
the isolated hamlet of Eselbank and on to the Moravian mission village of
Wuppertal with its pretty white church. 4x4 route is a little misleading as I meet a
crowded, rusting Corolla crawling along in the other direction. I wonder how much of its undercarriage has
been left behind on the rocky track.
It’s a slow, rewarding journey through some of the more remote parts of
the range. Dramatic red sandstone formations wind-carved from the sediment of
what was once a warm shallow sea. The landscape wouldn’t have looked much
different when Lieutenant Clowes was patrolling the range on horseback just
after the turn of the previous century.
On the way to the Englishman’s Grave, I stop at the Mount Ceder resort
in the southern part of the range. I’ve
been told that there are more old British trenches near here and I want to find
them. I’d searched for them
unsuccessfully on a previous expedition.
I’d expected them to be on the river bank protecting the ford. They weren’t there.
This time a helpful staff member from
the resort directs me back up the pass.
Here, with a commanding view of the valley and the road through it, I
find the remains of the British defences.
A pile of rocks, once organised, now a jumbled crescent from the
past. It’s not surprising that the little
fortification consisted of a rock wall and not a trench. The ground here is stony and hard, an
infantry soldier’s dread.
This is an obvious defensive position situated above the road as it
crests a saddle. It was built just
below the ridge so that the soldiers manning it would not be silhouetted
against the sky. I imagine them here,
bored and homesick and drinking warm water from sun-heated canteens. It was then and is still an out of the way
part of the country.
One of the things about war is that the stories are often lost or
smudged by time. And so it is with the
Englishman buried on the Pakhuis Pass. There
are variations on his tale. The one I
find most likely is that Clowes’ patrol crossed paths with Boer scouts. A brief skirmish ensued and the young
Lieutenant lay dead on the stony mountainside.
Simple, brutal and tragic.
The Cederberg wasn’t a major theatre during the war. General Jan Smuts came into the area with a
commando in a largely unsuccessful attempt to recruit Cape Boers but there were
no major battles here. According to the
stories, Clowes had previously fought at the big battle of Magersfontein in
1899. The British force had been deployed to relieve
the siege of Kimberly. Due to poor British
reconnaissance and clever Boer tactics they suffered a defeat that stunned the
Empire.
It may have come as some respite for the young lieutenant to find
himself posted to this backwater of the war.
Though there is no telling whether it will be a significant battle or an
insignificant skirmish that will do for you in the end.
Lieutenant Clowes’ story doesn’t end with his death. The story goes that his mother, so overcome
with grief, travelled to the Cape Colony to visit his grave. It is told that she had his body moved from
where he was buried after the skirmish, to its current site higher up the
mountainside. It is said that she
returned every year on the anniversary of his death. This would have been quite an achievement. First a long voyage from England, then an
arduous journey by wagon from Cape Town which would have taken several days. The long winding Pakhuis Pass through the
Cederberg, now a good tar road, would have been little more than a wagon
track. Even one visit would have been an
impressive undertaking by someone more familiar with the cool, green lanes of
England. Clowes was, after all, from
Hitchin in the gentle landscape of Hertfordshire.
That evening I sit by my camp fire with the dogs sleeping at my feet and
reflect. In the great sweep of history,
wars are reduced to a series of dates and famous battles and names of
generals. Occasionally one is reminded
that the true costs of war play out in the lives of many individuals. Some who live and some who die, forgotten by history
but remembered by the families who survive them. In the case of the young lieutenant who lies
buried here, his mother remembered him by travelling to this hot arid place to
visit his grave and to mourn his death, family paying the painful price of
keeping an empire.
Today there were flowers on Lieutenant Clowes’ grave. Someone is still remembering him more than a
century later.
